Bitcoin or bit-con? Meet the crypto-currency that’s taking over the internet

Bitcoin’s volatility makes it quite difficult to use as a currency at the moment, even as it sees more widespread acceptance among merchants. You can’t price in it, because a reasonable price at any given moment could be too low a few minutes later, and too high a few minutes after that. Services like coinbase.com seek to help with that by allowing prices to be set in dollars, with the equivalent value in bitcoins being calculated at the time of purchase, but there’s still the problem of converting back and forth to a less volatile currency (which is generally not a quick operation). Another problem is that the infrastructure surrounding the currency (the exchanges in particular) are terribly unreliable, often insecure, and sometimes downright shady. Wednesday’s crash was, if not caused by, certainly exacerbated by Mt. Gox’s inability to handle the number of requests it wa...